At CKP Suresh joined sculpture. What attracted him to sculpture was its spatiality and physicality; he was less inclined towards the imagistic. Moreover, pursuit of painting with paints, brushes, and canvases was an expensive proposition for him. As a student of sculpture he used to tie a log of wood, picked up from a wood depot or village, to his bicycle and go to CKP to carve. Sometimes he used to pickup wood from construction sites; the wood that is used for making shutters for pouring concrete and thrown away after use. For being a sculptor he didn’t have to spend any money on materials.
The themes that Suresh carved into wood were mostly biographical like his first experience of drinking Pepsi or the buildings in Bangalore that he really liked. One of the sculptures he made in stone was of Charles Correa’s building with the figure of a man smoking a beedi and admiring it. What Suresh liked in this building was its rawness with exposed concrete. He also did a portrait of a man sleeping on a bed carved in cheap wood that he picked up from a construction site. Some teachers used to tell him that he wasn’t experimental and did not use materials like metal or fiberglass, but for Suresh everything else other than discarded wood was expensive. Later, when he went for a residency to Centre for Environmental Planning and Technology (CEPT) at Ahmedabad, he continued similar explorations of the city’s rich architectural heritage of past and present and incorporated them in novel ways into his work.
Only after finishing the first year at CKP did Suresh realize that there is something called an art gallery. Until then what he thought he was doing was a hobby and learning in art school for the sake of doing. Once he got to know the galleries, he never missed a show. As students at CKP, Suresh and his friends would walk all over the town visiting galleries and watch artistic work on display. Towards the end of the course at CKP, Suresh and his friends put up a show at Venkatappa Art Gallery by pooling money. They created a catalogue, made nice folders and exhibited sculptures and paintings of their classmates. This was Suresh’s experience at curating and organizing an art show.
What Suresh realized from this early discovery of galleries, however few they were in Bangalore city, and subsequently during his residency in Ahmedabad and later in Delhi as a student of Delhi School of Art, was the role of institutions in the making of art and artists. However, with his keen eye and mind, Suresh came to the conclusion that it is artists that make other artists, not the art schools, galleries, critics, market or patrons. Unlike literature, art cannot happen in isolation; it needs other artists. The existences of institutions, however powerful they may be, play a small part in creating artists. In fact, it is the other way around. It is the artists who make galleries, museums and the art market. But the very same people and institutions that have little or no role in creating artists sit on judgement as the arbiters of artistic taste. What Suresh was seeking was another model for art to happen and artists to flourish. A framework where artists support each other and a space that is non-judgemental.
Samuha was born of this desire to be an open space by the artists and for the artists. It was an inclusive community and a non-hierarchical space of equality, wherein money as universal medium of exchange plays a minimal role. It was conceived as a barter system, where artists need not apply with portfolio DVDs only to be rejected by secretaries who have not even opened them. In Samuha there were 22 artists who took paid subscription, in exchange for 17 days of gallery space in a year to display their own work or of other artists of their choice. The money contributed by the artists was used for rent and running expenses. They rented a space in Malleshwaram, where Samuha ran for a year with 33 artists displaying their work. There were no positions or people with different grades of importance. Suresh was simply a facilitator and saw his role as a handyman who did everything from changing bulbs to putting up the artwork on walls or arranging them on the floor. For Suresh it was a long performance in an Event that lasted a year. He saw his role as a worker in service of a concept, like a sculptor who thinks about an idea and then labours for it.
Since Samuha was envisaged as a non-gallery and non-institutional space absent of controls, it was closed at the end of a year; otherwise the temptation to become an institution however open, democratic and non-hierarchical it may be, would be too great to resist. Samuha for Suresh was a work of art in itself. Although he created the space and invited others to participate, he does not claim it as his alone. What was significant in Suresh’s idea and its closure at the end of a year was the notion that time not only erases, but also roots that which endures. The novelty and the force of the Samuha experiment as a yearlong curated project was its certain and distinctive end without the possibility of ever reviving it again. And yet, it shows the prospect of art in the absence of institutional support, patrons and mediators of taste.
The experience of Samuha and subsequent works in public space with other artists led him to realise that we don’t need space at all to do art. The recent experience of organizing three month long protests and resistance against the taking over of Venkatappa Art Gallery by private interests leads him to believe that there is an alternative to art institutions and art market: a collective and non-hierarchized space that can bring together all artists as equals. But for these alternatives to emerge, thrive and survive, one condition is necessary: that is, the role of speculative art market should be minimised, if not disappear altogether. Otherwise most of the artists would be busy making works for the market and would not have any time or inclination for collective action and participation.
This presents a dilemma for artists. How can they survive in the absence of buyers for their work? Suresh’s model for art in India, instead of looking at forms of patronage as developed in the West, looks at India’s own traditions and ways in which art and artists survive through local support. For art to be alive and flourish, major patrons and patronage is not a necessary condition. Many folk forms, especially performance traditions such as Yakshagana, puppetry and other ways of art endured not because of institutions and rulers, but through two important factors that continue to operate even today. First, the audience were local and artists rarely looked beyond a limited territory for them to perform. Secondly, patronage too was local and small. If artists pursue a goal of scaling up, reach vast territory and garner worldwide audience, then large patronage will be necessary. But for art to be local and addressed to local audiences, micro patronage and small support is sufficient.
Suresh wants all artists to relook at their own artistic ambition of becoming famous by showing in galleries and museums all over India and abroad. If an artist looks at his/her audience as people in the city or even a locality s/he would be more international than seeking international audience. The local would be specific to a locality. A model that succeeds in one local market cannot be replicated in another locality, leave alone on an international scale.
In the last two decades, art has taken a contemporary turn. The contemporary, which signifies temporal existences or being together in the same time, has become a conceptual and stylistic category to designate art as practiced in the present replacing the term Modern Art. However, as a concept, contemporary lacks significance and as a style even less so, because there are so many varied art practices and combinations of media within the contemporary that it is very difficult to, if not impossible, to delineate what contemporary art is. As a result anything, as long as it is done by any individual considered as an artist, or consecrated by an art institution it passes of as contemporary art. However, there are few things that are common across all contemporary art practices and artworks. Firstly, the idiom of contemporary art is still Modern, but without the philosophical and historical specificity that informed the artists hundred years back. The Modern artists were the first to appropriate and assert one of the foundational philosophical principals of Modernity: autonomy of self and that sovereignty as self-giving. Moreover, the idea of autonomy of artist and art is now extended to appropriation, that is, an artist can appropriate anything from anywhere and incorporate them into their work. The second common feature of the contemporary art is the general lack of cultural specificity. All contemporary artwork looks similar and grapples with similar ideas, either it is done by artists in Shanghai, Bangalore, New York or Lima. Likewise, what is seen in Mumbai is no different then what is shown in London. Undoubtedly, the impact of neo-liberal globalization that imparts identical experience across geographies and flattens all differences other than local currencies is reflected here. Also, the markers of cultural specificity, both material and conceptual that are rooted in the environment and historical experiences of people are fast disappearing. The third common characteristic of the contemporary art is the instantaneity of its access across the globe; as a result, the ability to experiment over an extended period of time and arrive at maturity of style or ideas, which accords a unique signature to an artist, is abridged substantially. Furthermore, the quick, open and easy access has lead to proliferation and appropriation everywhere and from anywhere.
Suresh Kumar would be considered as a contemporary artist not only because he is creating in the present, but also because the body of his work produced in last fifteen years would fall within this domain. As such, he is subject to the same vicissitudes of any other artist designated as contemporary anywhere in the globe. However, what distinguishes Suresh’s practice as an artist as well as his community and curatorial activities, is his attempt to seriously think through contemporaneity and always highlighting the historicity of the contemporary. In this regard, there are two elements that enable him to undertake this meditation. Firstly, his strong affinity to the biographical and personal memory as source of artistic creativity and extending it to grasp the present; and secondly, his conscious effort to confine his practices to one specific place: Bangalore. Suresh’s practice that attempts to understand the nearby through the far-off and revealing the present as fragments, aligns very closely with what Hal Foster has recently been advocating, “the sense of actuality” in the works of art . That is the “works of art that are able to constellate not only different registers of experience (aesthetic, cognitive, and critical) but also different orders of temporality. This constellation is opposed to the virtual confusion of spaces and the zombie confusion of times…” (Foster, 2015, 155). Another distinguish aspect of Suresh as an artist is his advocacy for non-institutional model of artistic practice that looks to reach into Indian’s own traditions and actualize them.
Pithamber R. Polsani is a faculty and Dean of School of Advanced Studies and Research at the Srishti Institute of Art, Design & Technology, Bangalore. He is a Co-Editor of Unbound and his current interest is focused on the notion of contemporaneity in India.
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